Funding Plan Lifts Shares of Zhipu AI

“Shares of Knowledge Atlas Technology, known as Zhipu AI, rose sharply after the Chinese artificial-intelligence company announced plans for a US$4 billion fundraising to support growth, despite pricing the new shares at a discount.

 

The stock surged as much as 22% in early trading Thursday, before paring gains to close up more than 11% in Hong Kong at HK$2,032.

 

The Beijing-based company is offering 19.78 million shares at HK$1,588 each, a near 13% discount to the stock's closing price on Wednesday price of HK$1,825 a share.

 

AI companies are ramping up spending on computing infrastructure and large-language-model development.

 

Chinese AI firms have been raising billions of dollars to compete with global players such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google as businesses race to leverage generative AI to automate tasks and boost productivity.

 

Last month, DeepSeek raised more than US$7.4 billion in its first funding round to support expansion. That deal valued the Chinese firm at more than US$50 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

 

Zhipu AI also is competing with rivals at home, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax, that are investing heavily in large language models. Last month, Zhipu launched the GLM-5.2 model, its most powerful large language model to date.

 

Zhipu's share price has rallied since its listing in January, pushing its market capitalization to more than US$100 billion.

 

Proceeds from the private placement will be used for research and development, cloud computing services, business expansion and potential mergers and acquisitions.

 

CICC is acting as the placing agent for the transaction.” [1]

Among the domestic rivals mentioned, Alibaba stands out as the leader in open AI robotics with its RynnBrain foundation model and the Qwen robot world model. By contrast, Zhipu AI, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax primarily focus their heavy investments on reasoning, coding, and general multimodal language models.

The robotics landscape among these Chinese AI developers highlights distinct specializations:

•     Alibaba: The undisputed leader in this group for embodied AI and robotics. The lab released RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model tailored for real-world robotic tasks such as mapping objects, predicting trajectories, and navigating cluttered environments. They also support the Qwen robot world model, which recently topped real-world robotics benchmarks.

•           DeepSeek: Renowned for exceptionally cost-efficient language and reasoning models like their V-series and R1. They do not currently have a dedicated, flagship open robotics model suite, acting instead as a primary API and token provider.

•           Zhipu AI (Z.ai): Focuses heavily on massive language knowledge, reasoning, and coding capabilities with models like GLM-5.2. While highly powerful for text and task-management, Zhipu does not offer a prominent open robotics architecture.

•           Moonshot AI: Specializes heavily in long-context agentic work (via their Kimi platform) rather than physical robotics.

•           MiniMax: Known for strong multimodal and emotional AI companion features. Like Zhipu and DeepSeek, they offer fantastic APIs but lack a widely adopted open-source robotics foundation suite.

 

1. Markets & Finance: Funding Plan Lifts Shares of Zhipu AI. Qu, Tracy; Venkat, P R.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 10 July 2026: B9.